Power windows fundamentals: Shapes and softness

Keyboard Shortcuts

Learn power windows fundamentals in DaVinci Resolve 11, like incorporating shapes and softness. This tutorial will teach you how to accentuate a portion of the image by using a power window shape. Any color correction will only take place inside the power window, allowing creation of dramatic effects. Adjusting a shape's softness will create a gradient effect around the edges of the image. Create custom shapes to adjust hue, saturation, or luminosity on unusually shaped objects.

- Now let's take some time to look at…our window shapes and how this interface works…and how we might use it and why I have it here,…in the chapter on secondaries.…The first reason it's on the chapter of secondaries is,…by definition, a shape targets a portion of the image.…I've already done a base grade…on this particular shot and what I want to do…is accentuate this shaft of light.…When I'm color grading I'm always…looking for this type of thing to happen.…If I can accentuate this and add some more drama,…that adds a lot of production value…to the images we're looking at.…

What I'll do is, I'm going to select a shape,…and let's start with our circle shape.…Notice on our node, suddenly our node is…showing us what's going on in here.…I have a circle turned on.…Now any color correction I do will…only happen inside this shape.…For instance, let's go extreme and…let's come into our primaries and pull that into blue.…So now only inside this window am I getting…any kind of blue correction happening.…

I can turn this off, and when I turn it off…

Resume Transcript Auto-Scroll

Author

Released

11/7/2014

DaVinci Resolve is the go-to tool for colorists working on Hollywood films, commercials, and corporate video. Now, with both the free and full-featured versions available, it's accessible to anyone looking for a high-quality color-grading solution for Mac or Windows.

In these tutorials, indie-feature-film and broadcast colorist Patrick Inhofer guides viewers through color grading with DaVinci Resolve and Resolve Lite 11. With emphasis placed on real-world techniques and workflows, the course will help editors and aspiring colorists edit in the timeline, perform primary and secondary color corrections, match shots from multiple cameras, create mood-rich looks, and render out movies to share with clients. Interspersed throughout the course are "lingo" movies, which will help you learn the language of colorists, and "in action" chapters, where Patrick applies the lessons learned to a real-world music video for the band Minimus the Poet.